Monday, November 08, 2010

Thoughts

I occasionally used grids and hard edges but just now I´m starting to see how important these two things are. I did a one point perspective grid to use as a shape in photoshop. Download it, save it somewhere and load it up.

Since its a shape, it can be transformed many times without having to worry about quality loss. I find it really helpful although it´s a tricky thing to avoid getting carried away and letting perspective get in the way of creativity or design.

I´ve been thinking a lot about process and purpose lately. I´m finding it quite useful to try to visualize in my head what I want to paint. Making color/palette decisions even before I lay a stroke. And I´m finally understanding, I think, there are several aspects of an image ( composition, mood, color palette, design, story) that I need to pay attention to in the very beginning.

A great idea can be badly rendered and still be great, making a point. And perfectly rendered painting, might be purposeless. I don´t want to find myself again adding detail or fiddling with lighting on a painting when no matter how well I render it, the end result will be bland due to bad design or the lack of a storytelling point.

Soooo, anyway! Here´s a perfect example of what I´m saying. Nice perspective grid, but what now, composition is all wrong. It´s like the hint of a set in a badly composed photograph waiting for actors to show up and do something worth watching.

And here´s another one wip. It was a lot of fun. I really used the pen tool a lot on this one. I´m enjoying to control and "finetuneability". But again, I gotta think more. about scale, composition, design and the list goes on!

So stay tuned for some more paintings were I really really think about what I´m doing. I´m thinking a series of some sort would be a nice and effective way to "tackle" these problems. And I wont avoid characters this time.

Tom- hehe. I setup a shortcut to acces the paths window. so every time I create an important silouhette(sp?) I save a new path. Once you get the hang of using ctrl/shift/alt with the pen tool, its quite fast and editable!